Reasons Why I Can’t Handle This Shit Right Now by Makeda Loney

Reasons Why I Can’t Handle This Shit Right Now

We have created camp on a fucking massive rock hurtling through the universe at 17,000 miles an hour that if it falls out of orbit, we could all fucking die but I don’t have the power to text you back.

I went shopping for condoms and the frail woman comparing two types of lube eyed me cautiously as if my body wasn’t worthy of love. Bitch I am a pleasure palace.

Almonds don’t actually make milk, I don’t know what it’s called but Trader Joe’s calls it almond beverage and I fucking salute them.

I’ve noticed that this is more of a rant than a poem, but my poetry is just a free form version of my mind so I’m going to let it rock.

I tend to fall in love with risk takers. Seeing that I’m probably the biggest risk you’ll ever encounter. There was this one woman who dove headfirst into my spirit and found my beauty in the brevity of my words and said “you have no idea how attracted to you I am right now.”

I haven’t spoken to her two years.

I am fat, black, queer, and a woman yet the world doesn’t understand that because I don’t have a blunt target painted on my head that this world isn’t against me. It’s there, I was just born with it on my skin.

I was granted the title Woman of Promise but all I can promise myself is a slightly false sense of optimism as long as my heart is still beating. I can promise that the sun does rise and fall everyday just as it does every time you smile. I’ve always wondered what it was like to bathe in sunshine.

I then found out that I didn’t need a bikini to drown in ocean that is your eyes, my glasses will do just fine

I’m still ranting but my heart is still trying to get some clearance.

I try to find myself everyday at the bottom of wine and whiskey bottles and the occasional bottle of rum and all I could think of is

Maybe I’m a wreck. Maybe I’m meant to do magical things, like turn my tear ducts into wishing wells so people could find hope in my eyes.

Maybe I’m a fortress, built up with walls that tell of the stories that were torn into my skin by rocks and cement and needles dabbed in ink. My family calls it the devil’s work but they can speak for myself more than my lungs can.

I am a dream of a dream of a dream, I have no idea where my grandmother is but I’m pretty sure she’s proud of me.

There is a chance that my anxiety may kill me sending chills down my spine catapulting me into another depth of my depression.

One of my best friends committed suicide before I could honestly tell him how much the world would rip apart without him.

I don’t have enough thread to sew it all back together.

I am sweating profusely as you all judge me for the content of my words which is just another way of saying I don’t agree with your character but,

I still think you’re as beautiful as bluntly possible.

Is the age where I lost my virginity.

Is the age where I found out that words possess the same amount of force as a loaded gun.

Is when I thought it would be okay to aim that gun at someone else in hopes they would see the best in me.

Makeda Loney is a copywriter by trade, poet by internal force. She’s a Brooklyn native, but her heart traverses the universe with more than a Metrocard. Through her writing, she tries to translate the storm that’s been brewing inside her since she was born. : kedanomics.tumblr.com